These paragraphs might be the most
satisfying to read for a long time in an NBC News story: President
Donald Trump's pardons gutted the prosecutorial unit at the Department
of Justice responsible for the January 6 cases. Some described it as
being part of the worst days of their careers. We don’t care. Others
have already left the DOJ since last summer, joining the Kamala Harris
campaign with the explicit hope that their work could help prevent Trump
from killing the January 6 cases (via NBC News):
Federal prosecutors in the now-disbanded Capitol Siege
Section of the D.C. U.S. attorney's office spent much of the last four
years prosecuting cases against Jan. 6 rioters. Suddenly, a single
signature erased the end results — though not the public record — of
that work.
Three prosecutors who worked in the section described
the week to NBC News, with one calling it the worst of their
professional lives. It started with President Donald Trump’s signing of
the pardons. Soon, prosecutors were dismissing the active cases that
remained and putting aside evidence they hoped would have led to more
charges.
[…]
Ashley Akers,
who worked on Jan. 6 cases and
left the Justice Department on Friday, called the pardons “shocking” and
said she had a “guttural” reaction to having to file motions to dismiss
cases when she felt she had evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that
showed assaults against law enforcement. Many in the office had
developed close relationships with the police officers who were injured
on Jan. 6, 2021, which had kept them dedicated to the work.
“It
really undermines not only the sacrifices that all these officers made,
but the experiences that they went through,” said Akers, who spoke to
NBC News after she turned in her computers and left the department. “The
public record — which is very clear and borne out in hundreds of trials
— has shown that these officers are victims.”
The prosecutors
acknowledged that while the Constitution gives the president
extraordinary pardon power, they still found it extremely difficult to
file the motions, under orders from new bosses, dismissing cases they
had brought.
“It goes against every instinct that I have,” one
federal prosecutor previously assigned to the Capitol Siege Section told
NBC News. This person is still working for the Justice Department and
spoke anonymously because their employment would be in jeopardy if they
spoke on the record.
[…]
Some prosecutors decided to leave
even before Trump was elected. Jason Manning, a former federal
prosecutor who worked on Jan. 6 cases, left the Justice Department over
the summer, joining Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign. He said he
hadn’t previously been a really political person, but he heard Trump’s
pledges to pardon Jan. 6 offenders on the campaign trail and he knew the
Justice Department’s work against rioters would “grind to a halt” if
Trump was elected.
I’m here to tell these people one thing: no one cares. They haven’t
cared for years. It’s why January 6 was never a top issue among voters,
except the far left and the Trump deranged. The House Select Committee
was viewed with derision, as it was a political circus. And the true
figure showing the Democrats’ messaging failure is that more voters
began to view Joe Biden, not Donald Trump, as ‘a threat to our
democracy.’
All your shoddy, politically motivated work got
burned to ash. Meanwhile, you throw a tantrum over these pardons but not
the ones issued by Joe Biden, where he pardoned his son Hunter and his
entire crime family before he got wheeled out of Washington? Because of
that, Trump can and should pardon whomever he wants.
Meanwhile,
if the violent and rowdier J6 defendants got charged, this whole thing
would’ve had a different ending. The Blaze’s Steve Baker, who got
wrapped up in a legal nightmare over his footage, said that the DOJ’s
overreach played a significant role in shifting the tide on J6:
Former
Jan. 6 defendant Steve Baker — a libertarian writer who entered the
Capitol during the attack, licensed his footage to media outlets, and
then became a reporter for Glenn Beck’s outlet, The Blaze — told NBC
News that he believed that federal prosecutors’ cases against
misdemeanor defendants, and what he sees as overreach against other
nonviolent participants, gave the right leverage in the battle over the
story of Jan. 6.
“I can guarantee you this, I would bet a year’s
salary on this,” Baker said. “Had the DOJ focused on the violent
offenders only, we would have never heard the word ‘pardon’ in a
campaign promise from President Trump.”
Anyways, the January 6 theater is over by order of President Donald J. Trump.
At long last.
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